The Blues
The blues, emerged from secular folk music created by African Americans in the early 20th century, originally in the South. While blues lyrics often deal with personal adversity, the music itself goes far beyond self-pity. From the early days of blues, the lyrics of blues music singers often followed a problem-and-resolution, or call-and-response pattern. The blues is also about overcoming hard luck, saying what you feel, ridding yourself of frustration, letting your hair down, and simply having fun.
Blues songs were centered around the pain of loss and injustice but also expressed the victory in outlasting these painful experiences. The blues developed in the southern United States after the Civil War. It was influenced by enslaved people singing work songs and spirituals while working the plantations, struggling to express their human thoughts and emotions in the midst of subhuman oppression. It's generally accepted that the music evolved from African spirituals, African chants, work songs, field hollers, rural fife and drum music, revivalist hymns, and country dance music.
These musical styles were the foundation of blues. The blues was performed in a variety of settings and styles. Musicians often played in ‘tent shows’ while accompanying travelling doctors, musical companies, comedians, magicians, and even circuses. Ballads would be played, as well as Ragtime, Gospel songs, and folk tunes. From the Atlantic coast all the way down to the Gulf-and across time-the melancholy flatted notes of the Blues reached many.
No single person invented the blues, but many people claimed to have discovered the genre. For instance, minstrel show bandleader W.C. Handy insisted that the blues were revealed to him in 1903 in Clarksdale, Mississippi after leaving a teaching post in Alabama. While waiting for a delayed train on tour he heard a man singing and playing guitar nearby. The man was pressing the blade of his knife on the strings, producing sliding chromatic notes along a three chord progression; the singing proved just as interesting, as he turned a boring wait into a captivating musical journey.
It made an impression on Handy, who described the performance as ‘haunting’. With his talent and musical education he wasted no time in copying down his fellow traveler’s 12-bar song structure that moved along those three chords, using flattened ‘blue notes’ too. It was then that trumpeter and composer W.C. Handy, dubbed himself the “Father of the Blues”. Blues is acknowledged as the root from which sprang jazz, rhythm and blues (R&B), and rock and roll. In addition, it has informed the genres of country and western, gospel, and bluegrass.
Blues and its offspring have long since crossed the globe, but its standard-bearers are largely confined to the Mississippi River Delta, especially eastern Arkansas and western Mississippi. It was during this time that blues emerged as a unique genre, originating from the experiences and emotions of Black folk living on the plantations. The Delta, with its flat plain nestled between the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers, became the cradle of this expressive musical form.
As the Great Migration of Black workers commenced, the blues spread its wings and resonated with communities across the South and the entire United States. Musicians played in a variety of settings, from tent shows accompanying traveling doctors, comedians, and magicians to theaters and churches. The deep, soulful sounds of the blues scale, with its flattened notes, captivated audiences from the Atlantic coast to the Gulf, leaving an permanent mark on American music.
Traveling blues musicians embodied the spirit of the genre, going to great lengths to share their music with the world. From hitching train rides to serenading audiences on crowded sidewalks, these intrepid artists played their hearts out in brothels, drinking halls, and lounges. Their passion and dedication knew no bounds. Armed with their harmonicas and guitars, they brought the blues to every corner they could reach.
